Lee.org

Oh yeah.

Predixis and MusicMagic Mixer

There are some serious privacy concerns with the MusicMagic Mixer but it looks very interesting nonetheless. (the company gets to see all of the music on your hard drive. Their current privacy statement implies that they keep all that info forever but they’ll never share it with anyone (unless, of course they are under a subpoena))

The web based search-thing looks pretty cool. It’s a “similar music” engine.

Trevor Blackwell built his own balancing scooter (ala Segway). He made some very interesting comments on it’s ridability.

Then he went on to build a balancing unicycle!

This self balancing 2 wheeled electric skateboard is a marvel.

Constant innovation!

WBZ News
Century-old New York City subway gets a computerized facelift

“They’re going to be sending signals via radio waves,” said Councilman Lewis Fidler, a Democrat from Brooklyn. “I don’t want to find out that someone hacks into the system and makes a train disappear and another train rams into it.”

Such a scenario is unlikely, said Tom Sullivan, an independent transit consultant with Transportation Systems Design in Oakland, Calif., who helped design the L-line upgrade.

The data carried on radio waves are encrypted, so only an internal leak could compromise its security, he said. Though it’s possible to jam the radio signal, he said, that would only make the train stop.

So a bad person with a couple (or a couple hundred) $50 jamming radios in the right locations could completely paralyze the NYC subways system. Cool… err.. that’s awful! err… kew1.

You should backup all your data. I know that’s what I’m doing at this moment, after reading these stories of woe on engadget.

I was going to quote all of the horrible stories for you until I realized that it was almost 800 kilobytes of stories. 582 entries in total. A lot of folks apparently used the writing experience as catharsis.

So I’ll just give you a couple of the best ones and you can get the whole thing in this RAR archive.

Check below the cut…
Continue reading ‘Make Backups’ »

This really freaks me out.
SSI Super Duper Shredder. Shreds all that ails you, from washing machines to 55 gallon steel drums.

Check out a local copy of the video that freaks me out the most.

Jeez…. I might just have nightmares about this thing… So why am I blogging it?!!?

This got me really mad and really sad. I think I’ll go steal some music off the internet and then send the bands I actually listen to donations in small, unmarked bills.

Here’s an exurpt, just to get you in a pissy mood.

You have to pay them [ASCAP and BMI] even if you only play music by non-RIAA artists. This because SoundExchange (the non-incorporated subsidiary of the RIAA who collect the fees) is authorized to collect on behalf of all copyright holders, even non-RIAA members. If you want to avoid these fees, you’ll need a waiver from every artist/publisher you play (in other words, it’s impossible.)

Since the first time I heard the word “groupware” in…. I think it was ’91, referring to Lotus Notes, I have wondered what it was supposed to be. Like, in an ideal world where opening up a Notes database didn’t take 2 minutes. Recall that in Notes, each email you received was stored in “The Database”, so just the act of opening 5 emails would take 10 minutes. It sucked.

In a couple of the companies I’ve worked at, I was asked if I could help design a groupware infrastructure to, in pre-dot-bombeze, “optimize knowledge-flow”. My answer every time, partially in response to some careful review, but more out of visceral instinct, was to stay as far away from those slow, poorly written, hard to maintain, poorly supported, unscalable, unchangeable, non-interoperable, did I mention slow, proprietary “high concept” systems as possible. Good old POP3, SMTP, FTP, HTTP, SMB and maybe that new-fangled IMAP were, in my mind the only systems that worked reliably enough to trust a business’ information to. Exchange? Notes? Domino? Expensive poopie-ka-ka in my experience.

(To be fair, my last review was in 2001. Groupware might have changed since then… might have.)

Why am I telling you this? Because JWZ has written a blog entry that talks a lot about groupware that hits the nail right on the head! Thank you JWZ!

(the entry is below the cut for posterity)
Continue reading ‘Groupware BAD’ »

How about a 1 terabyte CD? I could put all my war3z, movies and music on one disc. kewl.

It’s not science fiction.

From eWeek

…the Tapestry HDS-200R, is expected to hit the market this year. The new version will be a 200GB recordable drive…

From Jon Udell’s blog… He’s talking about how the Tivo SDK was made available (for you non-geeks, SDK stands for “Software Developers Kit”. It means that normal every-day people will be able to fiddle with the internals of how their Tivo works. He quotes an interview with Arthur van Hoff, an old-sk00l uber-geek:

I have an X10 home lighting system, and I’ve written a Java application that runs on a Linux server in my closet that the TiVo discovers. So I can now control all the lights in my house, and turn on the fountain in the back yard, and stuff like that.

While sitting in his Barkolounger, this guy can control his backyard fountain with his TV remote control (!!)

How cool is that? Errr. How lazy can this guy be? Err….. That’s freaky frickin awsome… errr…